Nuveen’s proprietary impact framework for taxable fixed income strategies is aligned with the Green Bond Principles, requiring transparency and disclosure for labeled green bonds. We also encourage issuers of unlabeled green bonds and other thematic bonds classified under the impact framework to follow these best practices as much as possible. As market standards evolve, we will continue to engage issuers to increase transparency and disclosure over time.

We have been a pioneer in the green bond market since 2007. We also frequently invest in unlabeled green bonds, as long as they meet the environmental and/or social criteria for our proprietary impact framework. We are among the top 3 largest green bond investors in the market according to Bloomberg as of December 2019, holding over $3.4 billion in green bonds across the firm. Within the framework, the Renewable Energy & Climate Change and Natural Resources themes align well with both labeled and unlabeled green bond investment, while the Affordable Housing and Community & Economic Development themes align with social bond investment. In addition, we were represented on the initial Executive Committee of the Green Bond Principles, and have participated in standard-setting process of the Climate Bonds Initiative, S&P, and Moody's.

We require annual impact reporting for labelled green, social and sustainability bonds and encourage issuers of unlabelled thematic bonds to follow these best practices as much as possible. For unlabelled bonds, we may reach out to the issuer to seek post-investment disclosure of impact metrics aligned to the project type (e.g. for our renewable energy and climate change investments, we would request CO2 emissions avoided or renewable energy generation produced). Our approach recognizes that impact reporting methodologies are nascent for many thematic investments; therefore, we use engagement as a mechanism to help encourage best practice over the course of the investment.

We published our third impact report in 2019 for Nuveen’s taxable fixed income impact investment strategies.  Over the past three years we have advanced and expanded our impact reporting practices to include new information of interest to clients. For example, in this year reports we included impact metrics by geography. The impact summary is publicly available at: https://www.nuveen.com/en-us/thinking/impact-report. 

Note: the above reflects practices for impact investments in our taxable fixed income strategies given these strategies make up the majority of impact investment AUM in fixed income.